Niko Papademetriou

For a very long time, my North Star, the person that gave me a lot of my belief in myself, was my dad.

My parents for sure, but my father specifically.

He worked very hard for a long time.

He was a very smart guy.

but he had a deep belief that he was never the smartest guy in the room, that there were others around him regularly.

In fact, he seeked those people out.

He wanted to insert himself in rooms, proverbial rooms, where he wasn't the smartest guy, where everybody else around him gave him an inferiority complex.

And then he wanted to beat through that, if you will, with just sheer determination and hard work.

And so I grew up in a household where I saw an immense amount of just brutal work done

doing the work.

And for a long time, he used to talk about, he was an immigrant and my mother was an immigrant as well.

And he used to talk about longingly the fire in an immigrant's belly.

They'd come to the United States, for example, and you know, there's no second chance.

There's no such thing as going home.

And he used to tell me,

very truthfully and very raw.

It was hard to hear when I was younger that I didn't have that fire in my belly because almost not even my fault, but because I grew up with everything, right?

I grew up in a house in America.

We had a car, we had a nice two cars, right?

I went to a great school.